Summary
This Innovative & regionally inspired project,
used Action Learning and open learning to enable 150 small businesses to
improve their innovation for significant wealth creation. A video presentation of
Action Learning is shown bottom left
Major Learning point for Citizen Enablement
Small business managers, citizens in their own right in the community, quickly gained the confidence to become more innovative for wealth creation. They learned a great deal from each other using the best principles of ‘positive deviance’ & Action Learning. The support development cost only approximately £3,000 per individual manager to deliver. As well as giving them more confidence to be innovative and try the new, it led to an overall improvement of approximately 2.4 % gross value added for over a hundred citizens average incomes.
The Case
James led the £2 million North West Development Agency project, known originally as NetworkingNorthWest and then by the small business participants as the programme became, more and more successful, as ‘Bouncing Higher’.
Some of our SMEs promoting a Let’s Bounce Event
These citizen professionals, shown above at the completion of the project, were in fact the managing directors of small construction firms who had a felt need for change. They became voluntarily engaged with other SME professionals with complementary aspirations, but not in competition with each other. It was led by academics having a real desire for citizen enablement, who provided high quality and ‘non directive’ facilitation. They advised that Action Learning, where a group process is arranged which enables participants to tackle an issue they are each facing, but which have no obvious solution. This technique has been shown to help those new to learning to deliver solutions creating real impact. Action learning is a process which enables academic facilitators to learn with small groups of business-community members by providing support and challenge. As a result there is collective improved understanding of the issues many have and provide a shared commitment to deliver effective solutions.
In the Bouncing Higher project construction citizen learners worked in SETs, consisting of those managers of firms within complementary small companies, who help each other learn how to self-question their common (but often bad) sense, existing views and behaviours on the basis exploring their own problems & issues openly with others. Action Learning Sets are structured to enable such small groups address complicated issues by meeting regularly and working collectively. This tool is especially geared to learning and personal development. It is normally run by someone with strong Facilitation Skills, particularly in its early stages. A mature group may successfully self-facilitate, by rotating the role. It is essential that one individual takes responsibility for this function. They learned how to put themselves ‘authentically present’ in the problems and issues of others – to give to all – and thus become involved in collective learning. This experiential learning support:
- engaged 50 Construction SME professionals
- got them working together openly with others in a true learning partnership, on live & worthy projects of mutual interest
- enjoying the self-development for:
- innovative and wealth creating ideas and concepts
- new methods and processes
- product breakthroughs
- Individual and team performance
- made learning appropriate to their needs, provided in many different ways, see below for some of the materials, to encourage innovation and wealth creation
- provided learning and support, NOT just teaching, to meet their needs
- exploited the informal ways of talking that businesses use and to formalise it
- got these professional citizens working together and using the same language perform amazingly
- Developing communities of practice
Some of the learning materials developed to support this programme
By way of a detailed example of success, Linda Rogers of Diva Designs a small firm manager, said of her own learning on her Action Learning programme – “my Action Learning SET ‘helped me, as a sole trader, invent a virtual tough talking credit controller to sign letters requesting outstanding payments which were threatening to damage my relationships with clients. The SET was also really helpful in encouraging me to do the business side of things, We may be from different sectors in our SET but there are lots of issues which are common to small businesses whatever they do.”
Major Learning point for Citizen Enablement
The small business managers, citizens in their own right in the community, quickly gained the confidence to become more innovative for wealth creation. They learned a great deal from each other using the best principles of ‘positive deviance’
The Enablers
Jane Houghton and James Powell were the main Citizen Enabler of ‘Bouncing Higher’. The learning support development cost only approximately £3,000 per individual manager to deliver. As well as giving them more confidence to be innovative and try the new, it led to an overall improvement of approximately 2.4 % gross value added for over a hundred citizens average income.
